SEO & Link Exchange Programs

Organic Search Listings are to your business as Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is to Major League Baseball’s Home Run Record. Appearing #1 in Google or Yahoo! are great ways to attract a ton of attention… and by corollary, generate a lot of sales.

Would you like an extra 2000 sales per month?

For example, if you appear well in Search Listing for a popular term, you will receive a lot of traffic. Studies differ in this but the last I read some 80% of searchers click on one of the first 3 links they are presented with. Let’s say you get the first listing for a term that has 100,000 searches a month. Let’s now assume that 40% click on your link and go to your site. That would amount to 40,000 site visits per month. If you converted 5% of those visitors you would make 2000 sales per month!

Organic Search Engine Rankings are a function of your site’s design, it’s content, how many other sites link to it, and how authoritative of a resource your site is.

Since links to your site are so important an astute reader concerned with making of the site asked about if link exchanges with directories are a worthwhile investment of time and resources. In her words:

What about link exchange programs with directories — like Linketeria for example. Does this really help me?

Well, this is a complicated question. But hey, my job is to make this complicated stuff simple! Here are some of my quick thoughts:

You need links in. Any kind of non-scheming links are better than none. Links involving click fraud, some paid inclusion, and other Black Hat SEO may encourage Search Engines to penalize you or even de-list your site.

The best kind of links are the ones having to do with your topic. Ex. The best links I could ever get would be from other website designers….I know, this is tricky! (Any website designers out there that want to link to me?)

The value of a link to your site is a function of how well that site ranks, how well it relates to your keywords, how the link is made and how selective a place is in giving out links. Ex. A link off of the homepage of Google’s webmaster resources (highly targeted, very trusted site that rarely links to others) would be the holy grail for me.

Don’t forget that links to your site are for people as well as SE’s! You are only targeting the SEs to get you people! If I had a link off of a small business site that had awesome traffic of people who wanted my services, who cares what Google thinks of it? That link would drive a ton of traffic to my site! Search Engine listings be dammed!

what about listing on web directories?
also…where can I find good quality web directories
I can search for them on google and find them one by one
Do the quality of the directories where I link also matter?
If so, how can I find them- which ones are good quality directories and which ones are not?

I’ve never really found them to be effective. The problem with directories is that the free ones offer low-quality links, because everyone is in them. The problem with the paid ones is 1) the cost and 2) there’s something wrong about paying to get a link.

While not expressly directories, I would target your main search engines and then make sure your company & website are listed there. For example, Google Plus account, Google Maps / business listing, Yahoo business listing, etc.